1) Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon

This past week the final release candidate (RC) for Linux Min 16 debuted, with both Cinnamon and MATE desktop editions.

The Cinnamon edition is particularly noteworthy in that it is the first Linux distribution to include the Cinnamon 2.0 desktop user environment. According to Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre, Cinnamon 2.0 represents 5 months of development and 856 commits from 28 developers.

Among the many improvements is the addition of configurable sound effects for desktop activities such as closing a window or switching workspaces. The Cinnamon 2.0 desktop also includes an improved system tray that keeps users updated on file operations.

"GNOME lacked a proper tool for user administration and Cinnamon wasn’t taking advantage of the innovations developed by GNOME on account management," Lefebvre wrote in a blog post. "In Cinnamon 2.0, both aspects were rewritten from scratch."

What's also important to note is how Cinnamon now diverges from GNOME. Until the Cinnamon 2.0 release, GNOME was the backend, but that now changes as Cinnamon has its own backend on which it is built.

"In version 2.0, and similar to MATE or Xfce, Cinnamon is an entire desktop environment built on GNOME technologies," Lefebvre explained. "It still uses toolkits and libraries such as GTK or Clutter and it is still compatible with all GNOME applications, but it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed. It now communicates directly with its own backend services, libraries and daemons: cinnamon-desktop, cinnamon-session and cinnamon-settings-daemon."

2) Fedora 20 Beta

Red Hat's community Linux distribution is getting closer to its next major release with the debut of Fedora 20 'Heisenbug' Beta last week.

The new Fedora 20 release makes ARM a fully supported architecture on Fedora. Fedora 20 is also noteworthy for its focus on making Big Data and more specifically, Apache Hadoop a first class citizen on Fedora.

Fedora 20 also includes a new logical volume manager (LVM) thin-provisioning capability. LVM is a widely used tool in Linux for logical storage management. Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron explainedthat the new thin provisioning capability allows for more efficient, better performing and easier-to-administer storage snapshots in terms of a shared backing storage pool.